Phonological Disorders: A Metaphon Study

Metaphon is built on the idea that homophony influences phonemic change. (Dean, 1990) A phonological disorder is a certain type of speech sound disorder and it can be referred to as an articulation disorder. Clients with a phonological disorder are unable to use a few or all of the speech sounds that correspond to their age group. This can result in their speech having poor intelligibility. Metaphon therapy is an approach used for the treatment on phonological disorders. On the basis of the evidence currently available with regards to phonological disorders it is suggested that pure phonological disorders are more likely to resolve themselves unconsciously in comparison to any other type of speech language impairment (Bishop & Edmundson, 1987).
Traditional approaches used on clients with phonological disorders have essentially been used within a behavioral framework and have concentrated on improving children’s articulatory production. To date, however, there has been a change to a more therapeutic approach being used which requires a high level of cognitive processes. There are several requirements that need to be met in order for metaphon therapy to be successful. Hewlett (1990) states that these are: (a) awareness of the problem (b) ambition to change the current problem (c) awareness of crucial articulatory targets. The basic concept of metaphon therapy is achieved by enforcing the phonological and communicative awareness of the client. The therapy includes exercises, which assist clients to understand that words are made of individual sounds and those sounds can be grouped and distinguished from different sounds. Metaphon therapy can be divided into phase one and phase
These processes include substitution (example fronting, stopping, gliding where one sound is replaced by another) or syllable structure (weak syllable deletion, final consonant deletion where the structure of the syllable changes or cluster reduction) (Bowen, 1997). During substitution processes at sound level the child will shift the vocabularly he/she has already learned and use it to explain the non-speech sounds: whistles, the therapists vocalisations and everyday noises such as cars and animals. The goal from this is to portray to the child that everyday sounds and vocalisations can be grouped as long-short or front-back. At phoneme level during this process whole sound classes are compared with the use of visual cues. Example all fricatives versus all stops are shown to the child but are still mentioning the sound properties. (Dean et al., 1995) The next stage the child then enters is known as word level. This stage allows for the child to be the listener and not the speaker. It involves a range of activites such as the speaker producing either a stop or a fricative and in correspondence the child will draw either a long or short banana onto a